The popular children's performer draws inspiration for his new CD from jump rope rhymes and playground sounds

Dave Fry plays for Holy Infancy School kindergarten students in south Bethlehem. (MICHAEL KUBEL, THE MORNING…)

March 17, 2014|By Kathy Lauer-Williams, Of The Morning Call

A crowd of children gathers when Dave Fry wanders with his guitar last week onto the Holy Infancy School playground in south Bethlehem. When he starts to play, he's rewarded with one of his favorite sounds — kids laughing and singing along.

Fry included that happy noise, the sounds of children playing, on his new CD "Playground."

"I wanted to capture the spontaneity and joy of what happens on the playground," Fry says. "The album starts with 29 seconds of that."

Fry's new children's CD, his first in a dozen years, mixes playground songs, dances and jump-rope ditties with rock and folk standards.

He will introduce "Playground" songs at a CD release party on Sunday at the south Bethlehem folk club he helped to found 38 years ago, Godfrey Daniels.

When he started making the CD, the Holy Infancy playground is where Fry headed with a tape deck to include the sounds and voices of South Side kids.

"These are my adopted kids," the south Bethlehem resident says. "I've been playing there for free forever. I just show up on the playground with my guitar."

He also recorded children singing along with his songs during a concert on the South Bethlehem Greenway. "I got a nice bed of running, screaming kids having fun," he says. "I embedded them into the general sound and it became a canvas."

"Playground" is Fry's third CD of children's music, following 2001's "Shake It" and 1998's "I Like Peanut Butter."

Some of his newer songs he performs at concerts weren't on the earlier CDs, and parents were bugging him for recordings of songs like "Baby Shark" and "Giants." "At that point I realized it was time for a new album," he says.

But it's expensive to produce a CD, and life as a traveling musician doesn't usually make you rich. Three years ago, he met philanthropists Linny and Beall Fowler at a First Friday event in Bethlehem, and mentioned to Linny he wanted to produce a new CD. That year, the Fowler Foundation awarded Fry $5,000 to make the CD, enabling him to hire musicians and record at Kevin Soffera's Hybrid Studios in Nazareth.

Fry wanted to explore the music that children themselves develop as they play.

"I was very curious about folk music at a kid's level," he says. "It's the music from the source that's important to me — playground songs and things that bubble up. As adults, we're not always privy to that."

One of Fry's most-requested songs at concerts is "The Tutie Tah." He learned the song at a preschool. "There is this whole subculture of funny and, at times, edgy material," he says.

He also was fascinated by jump-rope rhymes.

"It has a history to it and is passed down by older kids," he says. " There also are elements of creativity as kids change the rhymes. That empowerment appeals to me. I saw it as an urban rhythm exercise I could expand using my creative talent, but keeping it kid-based."

He looked to the legacies of folk singers Woody Guthrie and particularly Pete Seeger for inspiration.

He calls them great children's writers, noting their music is "amusing, witty and has somewhat of an edge."

He originally envisioned doing the entire album as if at a playground. But he settled on the playground-inspired opening track and "Jump Rope Mashup," which features vocals by Fry's 24-year-old daughter Rosalie Fry and Soffera's 10-year-old daughter, Jordan. The piece became a "mash-up" because most of the jump-rope rhymes are too short to be a song on their own.

"It was great to have my kid and Kevin's kid on it," he says. "I wanted them to do it as if they were holding a jump rope together. I knew they could sound as if they were sisters having fun."

Other songs on the CD include the danceable "Jimalong Joe," traditional tunes "Skip to my Lou," "All Around the Kitchen" and "Shoo That Fly," and favorites from Fry's live concerts including "Giants," "The Tutie Tah" and "Happy Shark."

Fry is thrilled with the strong contributions from other musicians including Soffera on percussion, Ansel Barnum on harmonica, Wendi Bourne and Robbi Kumalo on vocals, Kjell Benner on bass, Doug Hawk on keys, Rob Stoneback on trombone, Reid Tre on electric guitar and Joe Mixon on steel drums.

"I am firmly against namby-pamby, play-down-to-the-kids method," Fry says. "When I perform, I try to be intellectually honest and speak to the kids as an adult friend or their crazy Uncle Dave. Kids want music to be honest. And I love that this was musically challenging and the musicians took it seriously and had fun with it."

He has been somewhat surprised by which new songs have hit chords with audiences, as he tries the material out in school performances.

"All Around the Kitchen" is "growing leaps and bounds," he says. He had envisioned the traditional song as kids "being in the kitchen and dancing on the linoleum while mom is trying to make dinner." He encouraged Soffera to do percussion with kitchen knives and forks for the track. When he sings it live, kids dance along and add their own contemporary dance moves.